Columbia, SC –Jack the Giant Slayer, the long-awaited fantasy/adventure film rebirth of the “beanstalk” folktale, includes a climactic battle scene that features giants hurling flaming trees created with SpeedTree Cinema 3D plant/tree animation tools.

Toronto-based visual effects studio Soho VFX selected SpeedTree Cinema tools for a key scene in the Bryan Singer-directed film, where angry giants attack a castle using uprooted trees as flaming projectiles. SpeedTree was also used to create a digital forest with millions of trees, including ground level vegetation and plant life.

“SpeedTree’s high and low polygonal tree models were essential for rendering such an enormous number of trees,” noted Berj Bannayan, co-founder and Visual Effects Supervisor at Soho VFX. “The procedural nature of tree creation really made the process simple. Once you get a tree looking the way you want, SpeedTree allows you to easily generate many different variations with its optimization and culling tools. This saved us a huge amount of time in the creation of our forest.”

According to Michael Sechrest, President and co-founder of SpeedTree developer, Interactive Data Visualization (IDV), “It’s very satisfying to see SpeedTree Cinema used in another major studio production like Jack the Giant Slayer, and this adds to a growing number of feature films that have used our 3D vegetation tools, including some recent Oscar nominees.”